Natalie Kalmus (née Dunfee or Dunphy) (April 7, 1882, Houlton, Maine – November 15, 1965, Boston, Massachusetts),[1] was credited as the "color supervisor" of virtually all Technicolor features made from 1934 to 1949. She was the wife of Technicolor founder Herbert T. Kalmus from July 23, 1902 to June 22, 1922, although they continued to live together until 1944.[2]
Originally a catalog model, then an art student, Kalmus made sure sure that costumes, sets and lighting were adjusted for the camera's sensitivities. She was generally regarded as a nuisance, but her services were contractually part of Technicolor's services. In her attempts to keep colors from being rendered improperly onscreen, she was accused of going to the other extreme of mildness. She wrote: "A super-abundance of color is unnatural, and has a most unpleasant effect not only upon the eye itself, but upon the mind as well." She recommended "the judicious use of neutrals" as a "foil for color" in order to lend "power and interest to the touches of color in a scene."[3] Producer David O. Selznick complained in a memo during the making of Gone with the Wind:
| “ | [The] technicolor experts have been up to their old tricks of putting all sorts of obstacles in the way of real beauty. . . . We should have learned by now to take with a pound of salt much of what is said to us by the technicolor experts. . . . I have tried for three years now to hammer into this organization that the technicolor experts are for the purpose of guiding us technically on the [film] stock and not for the purpose of dominating the creative side of our pictures as to sets, costumes, or anything else. . . . If we are not going to go in for lovely combinations of set and costume and really take advantage of the full variety of colors available to us, we might just as well have made the picture in black and white. It would be a sad thing indeed if a great artist had all violent colors taken off his palette for fear that he would use them so clashingly as to make a beautiful painting impossible.[4] | ” |
Director Vincente Minnelli recalled of making Meet Me in St. Louis, "My juxtaposition of color had been highly praised on the stage, but I couldn't do anything right in Mrs. Kalmus's eyes."[5] Director Allan Dwan was more blunt: "Natalie Kalmus was a bitch."[6]
Her association with Technicolor was severed in 1948 when she named the corporation as a co-defendant in an alimony suit against Herbert Kalmus, when it appeared he was about to remarry. She sued unsuccessfully for separate maintenance and half his assets of Technicolor, Inc.[7] In 1950 she licensed her name for a line of designer television cabinets made by a California manufacturer.[8][9][10] Her personal papers are now in the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
"So Very Red the Noses," New York Times, Feb 16, 1936, p. X5.[I]t did seem strange that a color director would have concerned herself, in other respects, with toning down the color effects, instead of striving for the kaleidoscopic riot in which some previous color efforts have resulted.
Mrs. Kalmus explained that:
"You can tell a story with color," she said. "You can build character and locale with it. But if you use too much of it, you may just spoil everything."